Panel advocates for breakfast in schools

A panel of anti-hunger and child nutrition advocates led a discussion Tuesday about the importance of offering school breakfast, citing an increase in the number of children living below the federal poverty line and linking well-fed children to better academic performance.

Many schools already offer breakfast, but serving meals before class reduces the number of students who participate, the speakers said. The goal, they said, is to ensure breakfast is getting to students, particularly those from low-income families who may not be able to afford three meals a day.

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“If you serve breakfast before the bell when the kids aren’t there, they probably are not going to participate in the program nearly as much as they could,” said Adele LaTourette, director of the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition.

“The key is to serve it after the bell,” she said later.

One example was the Paterson school district, where about 92 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals, but thousands of kids weren’t taking advantage of the breakfast program, said Linda Reid of the Parent Education Organizing Council in Paterson.

At the urging of parents, the district last year rolled out a breakfast program for students in grades K-8 that began after the first bell. The program was expand this year to include all students, Reid said.

Tuesday's panel discussion was held during the Anti-Poverty Network of New Jersey’s annual Poverty Summit in Monroe Township.

Reginald Dorsey, state outreach coordinator with Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ), said Paterson was once on the group’s list of “underachievers” — districts with the lowest breakfast participation rates, but said it is now a model for other districts.

Campaign members have spent the past several years trying to convince schools to offer “universal” breakfast to all students. Schools receive federal dollars for serving meals, but the effort has still been met with resistance by teachers, some of whom are concerned that dedicating the first 15 to 20 minutes of the day to breakfast would cut into instructional time, or those who believe the cleanup would be a massive undertaking.

But the panelists said schools have learned to streamline the cleanup after breakfast, and that the state Department of Education has issued a memo recognizing the first few minutes of classtime when students are finishing breakfast as instructional time.

Moreover, they identified a number of issues with children who aren’t properly nourished, including exhibiting more behavioral issues and logging more visits to the school nurse.

LaTourette also tried to encourage those attending Tuesday's panel discussion to take the lead in bringing the breakfast campaign to their communities.

“It takes one person who has a passion,” she said. “It can be a school nurse. It can be a principal. … It can be a parent. It can be a parent group. It can be a school board member. But it’s oftentimes one person who leads the change.”